'Kill Your Darlings' is a biographical story of a murder that takes place in 1944 and brings together beat poets Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. The film stars Michael C. Hall, Elizabeth Olson, Daniel Radcliffe.

Austin Bunn fell in love with the writers of the beat generation — Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and the rest — when he was an undergraduate at Yale.

Bunn recalled being drawn in by the literary and sexual freedom of the beats, and Ginsberg in particular. "I remember … reading them like they were some kind of shameful secret, because they were so honest and brave in ways that I was not prepared to be," he said.

That inspiration led, eventually, to Bunn's writing the feature film "Kill Your Darlings," starring Daniel Radcliffe as a young Ginsberg in a true-crime thriller. The film, which Bunn co-wrote with director John Krokidas, went into wide release after its premiere at Sundance last year.

Bunn spent 2007-08 in Louisville as an Axton fellow, a creative writing residency at the University of Louisville. One of his plays, "Basement Story," was also a finalist at the Humana Festival's 10-minute play contest in 2012.

On Thursday, Bunn returns to Louisville for a public screening of "Kill Your Darlings" at U of L's Floyd Theatre.

The film takes place during the time the young Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs attended Columbia University together. While they were there (spoiler alert!), Lucien Carr, a gifted friend in their circle, killed an older man whom he claimed was stalking him.

"They all get embroiled in it," Bunn explained. The closeted Ginsberg "was wrapped up in a murder where he was forced to defend a friend against a homosexual predator. It seemed this crazy contradiction with everything I admired about him."

Although the incident made it into some of Kerouac's fiction, it hadn't been explored in depth by biographers, novelists or playwrights. To Bunn, the complex tangle of sexuality, creativity and murder seemed like "really ripe material."

Bunn graduated from the famed Iowa Writers Workshop after Yale. He made a name for himself as a journalist, with work published in The New York Times magazine and elsewhere.

But he still thought about the murder. "I dreamed of turning it into a play," Bunn said. In 2003, he discussed the idea over drinks with his college roommate from Yale, Krokidas, who had recently graduated from film school at New York University.

Krokidas liked the idea, but not the medium. "He said, 'That is not a play, my friend, that is going to be a movie, and we're going to work on it together,' " Bunn said. "He called it a Jedi mind trick."

By 2007, when Bunn moved to Louisville, the film had already been cast once. But the financing fell through — an experience that's common in independent filmmaking, he said.

So he kept working on it during his creative writing fellowship at U of L. "I definitely rewrote some of 'Kill Your Darlings' at Quill's Coffee," he said.

By 2012, the film had new backers and a new Ginsberg in Daniel Radcliffe — the "Harry Potter" star whose Gothic horror flick "The Woman in Black" had recently done well, proving he could draw audiences in a non-wizard role.

Krokidas also cast Dane DeHaan, the star of the sci-fi horror movie "Chronicle," as Lucien Carr, and Michael C. Hall as the older man obsessed with Carr.

"To see Michael C. Hall, who was the guy I had always dreamed of playing that part, sitting in front of me and asking me questions about the script, that was just a huge gift," Bunn said.

Critics praised the film after its release in 2013, with The New York Times' A.O. Scott naming it a Critic's Pick.

For Bunn, the greatest thrill has been traveling with the film to festivals and seeing audiences respond to it. "As a fiction writer … you're never there with people when they experience it," Bunn said. "Film is just the most powerful art form we have, so I feel very lucky to have that experience."

After the screening, Bunn will show some making-of footage, rough cuts and other background material, and will lead a discussion with the audience.

"Austin might be the perfect person to have co-written a screenplay about the complex relationship of Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr because as much of his previous work reveals, there's something erotic about danger, and something dangerous about the erotic," Leung said.

Reporter Matt Frassica can be reached at (502) 582-4502 or on Twitter @mattfrassica.